


Ghost Story

by Lirazel



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 00:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoe has her own share of ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Story

Mal wears his history on his face, in the set of his shoulders, the sardonic edge to his voice. He always makes sure he’s in Alliance-friendly bars on Unification Day and on the anniversary of the end of Serenity Valley, and he leaps into the fray with an eagerness that’s half-desperation, fists swinging and curses flying, like he wants the whole ‘Verse to know he’s a Browncoat. The name of his ship isn’t just a practice in self-flagellation: it’s a proclamation, a shout into the Black, defiance in the shape of a Firefly class transport ship.

Zoe buries her ghosts down deep, smoothes her face and steadies her hands, her voice level and her eyes clear. She follows Mal because that’s what she knows how to do and she has nothing left, and sometimes watching him spill his pain everywhere makes her feel better at how brittle she’s made her own. He bends so that she doesn’t have to shatter.

And then there’s something new, and for a while, she smothers her pain in Hawaiian shirts and lets pilot-hands coax her to happiness. After blood and shit, shrapnel and starvation, she never would have thought there would be a place in her life for plastic dinosaurs and ridiculous jokes. But Wash fits, sliding into the hollows the War left behind and filling her up in a dozen different ways. And somehow he knows when to ask and when to keep silent and she thinks he can pilot her as sure as he can _Serenity_.

And then he’s gone and her ghosts press twice as close as they ever did, and she smoothes her face and steadies her hands and tells Mal she’ll fly true, and she half believes it.

But now there’s one more ghost added to her collection, and she thinks this might be the one she can’t learn to hide.


End file.
